New Media IRL: "New Release" by YACHT

A beloved indie dance-rock duo changes the game again

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Jul 24, 2024

YACHT (Young Americans Challenging High Technology) are three artists in Los Angeles who make exuberant indie dance-rock and many other creative pursuits. For two decades they’ve released infectious music, much of it on the legendary DFA Records, even earning a Grammy nomination in 2019.

The musical output is just part of the story. YACHT have also published a philosophical handbook, designed an eyewear collection, created a fragrance, campaigned against NSA surveillance, programmed large-scale public art, and presented their work in art museums, universities, festivals, tech conferences, and rock clubs worldwide. Vocalist Claire L. Evans is also a highly regarded science writer and author.

YACHT’s wild output is so future-forward the group jokes their work is always seven years ahead of its time. This week YACHT once again steps into the future with New Release, a New Media drop that combines a vinyl release, a password-protected zip file, an audio commentary of the album, and other digital ephemera that can only be unlocked with a physical key included in the vinyl package itself.

Yesterday New Release went live exclusively on Metalabel, selling out all 100 first editions in just 90 minutes. Yacht has since added a “Second Wave” of 200 more editions, available here.

We sat down with Claire and Jona from YACHT to talk about New Release and their creative journeys.

METALABEL: You’ve made a new album called “New Release” that you’re putting out in an unusual way. Can you tell us about it?

JONA: We're releasing it physically first. The phrase that came to mind was a reverse preorder. As fans of music and buying music, I was always disappointed when an album came out digitally and then you'd have to wait three months for record to show up. And so I thought, what a nice experience to get a record first and to have a physical experience and connection and live with it for a period of time before it enters into the Thunderdome of streaming and play counts and social judgment. It could be something that you as a fan get to develop your own relationship with.

CLAIRE: We also password-protected it so you can't look at the digital stuff before you have the physical things. You need the physical album to give context to the digital material. Fans will have to sit on their hands for a few days while the records ship and then they'll be able to unlock a treasure trove of never-before-seen content and interesting files from our desktops.

METALABEL: You’ve been making music for twenty years and survived many eras of the music industry. Can you talk about what you’ve seen and where we are now?

CLAIRE: We've been bemused observers of the music industry. I never feel like we've had the opportunity or desire to participate in the business. We like doing what we can with whatever resources are available to us. When we were briefly on a major label, we did so much wheeling and dealing to try to get them to let us do what we wanted to do even when it seemed overly complicated, counterproductive, and narratively confusing.

Every time we make a record it's like we woke up from a dream and we're in a new world and we have to adapt to the circumstances of that world. We were booking shows on MySpace, then booking shows on Instagram, then going on weird Facebook live streams, then making comedy videos. We tried all kinds of things to varying degrees of success, but we've always tried to make it work.

METALABEL: The work you all do individually and as YACHT is so sprawling and unencumbered by platform or medium-specific boundaries. Has that come naturally to you? Is it more challenging to do things that way?

JONA: For me, it comes completely naturally. It's not like, “oh today, I'm gonna fuck around with making video art.” It feels like I have to do it and if I don't, I'll die. Like I'm a shark. I have to be moving through water at all times. There's no choice. Luckily I'm an optimistic person, so most of the time I'm happy when I'm doing it. I'm delighted at the affordance. But there are times when it's very dark and very hard and I hate everything that I've ever done and I can't imagine ever doing it again.

CLAIRE: Fortunately we have enough different kinds of projects cooking at any given moment that when you have that feeling you can make a lateral move and put some energy into something different. That gets you out of your head and brings you into a collaborative context or puts you in a different medium and gives you the opportunity to learn something. Then you can go back to the other thing and feel a little bit more refreshed or newly equipped.

JONA: It used to feel really chaotic to me. I used to be like, how do we make sense of all this stuff? There's so much stuff. There's so many different moods, tones, attitudes, no cohesive narrative. But then once you get enough distance and look in the rearview you realize: that's a body of work.

CLAIRE: That's the thing. We're not a brand. We're not a company. We're human beings. Of course it's going to change every 30 seconds. We're following our lives.

METALABEL: You made a short video for the album that has a line I can’t stop thinking about: “Sometimes it feels like your house is a store and your life is a job.” Can you talk about that feeling?

CLAIRE: It's something we talk about a lot. The more you notice it in the world around you, the more real it feels. It speaks to the fact that as individuals, we’re all expected to perform at the same scale as major brands. We're supposed to have monetizable output at all times. We can't have hobbies that are meaningless. Everything we do has to be a product.

You can't even express an interest in a particular social cultural landscape without somebody asking you to productize it in some way. We need to create space for meaningless diddling. That's such an important part of creative life and just being alive and cognizant of the things that matter, which are largely unquantifiable and personal. It’s an increasingly challenging thing. We've been trying to put our finger on that feeling and create an exit ramp for us.

JONA: So much of the music scenes that we came up in were regional, subcultural, and very much connected to specific groups of people coming together and doing things together in real space that had absolutely no commercial value whatsoever. That is a really important thing to cultivate and come from. And it's harder and harder to do.

METALABEL: The feeling I have looking at your universe is you’re people with an incredible amount of self confidence. You have a vision that you're not afraid to pursue. Looking at it as a creative person, it’s inspiring. What I want to be when I grow up.

CLAIRE: There's a certain Rubicon that gets crossed in an artist's life where there's no going back. When you're young you can make stuff with your friends and go on tour and sleep on couches and scrap it up. But then you get tired and you want to get a real job. We've passed that threshold. Now we're on the other side of it. We have no choice but to continue doing what we do, which is incredibly freeing because it means no one can take that away from us. We're not going to live any differently.

JONA: We're not going to trade that for dental insurance.

YACHT
”New Release”
Vinyl + .zip
100 editions (SOLD OUT) / 200 editions newly available

Collect "New Release"

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